Margery Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) 9th November

St Mary's members should sympathize with Margery Kempe, who was miraculously preserved when nine pounds of masonry and timber from a church vault fell on her while she was praying. This, like almost all we know of her, comes from The Boke of Margery Kempe, one of the earliest autobiographies in English, and a source of considerable controversy. The full text was discovered in 1934, her mystical life having previously been known only from some carefully chosen published extracts.

The trouble lies partly in Kempe's lack of a conventional mystical language such as that of Julian of Norwich, and partly in the nature of her story. Born the daughter of the mayor of Lynn, Margery married a burgess called Kempe, living a worldly social life until a period of insanity led to her conversion. She made a mutual vow of chastity with her husband after bearing fourteen children, went on pilgrimages to Compostela, Rome and Jerusalem, and lived a life in which activity and contemplation were strangely mixed.

Margery's text makes little distinction between the spiritual and the physical, and her account of her relationship with Christ has strong erotic overtones. She is tried for Lollardism and acquitted, endlessly persecuted by hostile neighbours and justified by her own devotion, and it is often hard to distinguish between humility and pride in her account. She is an appropriate saint for the post-modern period, the ambiguity of her story in no way hiding the fact that she was a very remarkable woman, whose perception of the unity of God's creation, however oddly expressed, was profoundly real.

Charles Plouviez